The present invention relates to processing of a sensed image for an output device.
Existing duplicating devices, such as for example a copy machine, a facsimile, and a scanner, include an imaging device for sensing image information (e.g., scanning or imaging) from an original document. The output of the duplicating device is stored in a file, transmitted across a network, or otherwise provided to an output device, such as a printer. Some duplicating devices include sufficient memory to store the sensed image in a compressed form or an uncompressed form. After storing the sensed image in the memory the duplicating device may provide the stored image to the output device (e.g., file, network, or printer) multiple times without having to re-sense the image. Depending upon the configuration, the system may permit simultaneous outputting (e.g., file, network, or printer) of the image and storing of the sensed image into memory. Unfortunately these systems, generally referred to as scan-once-print-many (SOPM), require significant amounts of memory to ensure that the entire image will fit within the memory. However, a sufficient amount of memory to store an entire image may be prohibitively expensive for consumer devices.
Existing duplicating devices may also include horizontal and vertical cloning capabilities, such as those disclosed in Tsuboi et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,124,799. Likewise existing duplicating device may include mirror capabilities, such as those disclosed in Arai et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,768,484. The image processing pipeline of the duplicating device incorporates the horizontal and vertical cloning, or the mirror process, and thereafter a print ready data stream is provided to the output device. Unfortunately, this technique requires substantial memory and computational requirements which may be cost prohibitive for consumer products.
What is desired, therefore, is a system that provides SOPM, horizontal cloning, vertical cloning, and/or mirror functionality in a cost effective manner.